Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use outback in a sentence

15 example sentences · noun, adjective, adverb

Outback means the most remote and desolate areas of Australia; the desert and areas too arid for growing crops. Example: “In the outback, many people live and work on sheep and cattle ranches.”

Examples of outback by meaning

nounThe most remote and desolate areas of Australia; the desert and areas too arid for growing crops.

  • In the outback, many people live and work on sheep and cattle ranches.2000, Shirley W. Gray, Australia, page 31
  • The outback′s rich, red soil looked like blood because of all the iron in it, and the vast land was so still and barren that it seemed lifeless.2002, Erinn Banting., Australia: The People, page 20
  • Barely a bird and definitely none of my target species greeted the morning so I cut my losses and headed north through the staggeringly vast emptiness of the Outback.2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 254

adjectiveCharacteristic of the most remote and desolate areas of Australia; very remote from urban areas.

  • In the Northern Territory, arguably the most outback of Australian states, police are still not armed.1996, David H. Bayley, Police for the Future, page 70
  • From Bathurst the Mitchell Highway heads northwest through Dubbo and Bourke Nyngan then continues for almost 200 km to the most outback of towns Bourke.2002, Andrew Swaffer, Katrina O'Brien, Darroch Donald, Australia: Handbook, page 215

adverbTo or towards the most remote and desolate areas of Australia.

  • If we want this country to develop, we have to depend on men who are prepared to go outback and try to discover new shows.1953, Western Australian Parliament, Parliamentary Debates, page 241
  • This has allowed Australians really to go outback in some reasonable comfort to see the attractions of this country.1984, Australian Senate, Parliamentary Debates: Senate Weekly Hansard, volume 3, page 1474
  • Like me, the son was inspired to go outback, and when things went wrong for him the desert seemed like the perfect place to perish and decay, to get blown around on the wind.2012, Andy Hughes, A Ringer′s Hands, page 10

More sentences with outback

  • Kylie and her parents had been driving through the outback for hours.2002, Erinn Banting, Australia: The People, page 30. From the entry kylie
  • Almost anywhere in the outback you can find adequate landing strips well maintained.1965, Aircraft, volume 45, page 22. From the entry aeradio
  • When a hobo roams through the outback with a matilda on his back, he is said to be “waltzing matilda.”1999, Milton Finkelstein, Global geography. From the entry matilda
  • British Columbia as a rule has been treated by the culture of Central Canada as somehow exotic and unCanadian, and Alberta as a parochial outback.1974, Herschel Hardin, A Nation Unaware: The Canadian Economic Culture, J. J. Douglas, page 321. From the entry unCanadian
  • The Reverend John Flynn, a man of simple tastes, was always recognisable in the outback, dressed in a suit, driving an old ute and puffing on a pipe.2007, Sheryl Persson, The Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia, Australia: Exisle Publishing, →ISBN, page 40. From the entry ute
  • In the Australian outback, industrial activity — notably open-pit coal mining — has turned verdant areas into moonscapes seemingly overnight, and the suicide rate in the region has skyrocketed.2007 December 20, Clive Thompson, “Clive Thompson on How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds”, in Wired Magazine, number…. From the entry moonscape
  • He captures brumbies, the wild horses of the outback, running them down on motorcycles and shipping them to the city where they are butchered for pet food.1967, December 22, Life, page 69. From the entry brumby

Meaning of outback

  1. noun The most remote and desolate areas of Australia; the desert and areas too arid for growing crops.
  2. adjective Characteristic of the most remote and desolate areas of Australia; very remote from urban areas.
  3. adverb To or towards the most remote and desolate areas of Australia.

Full definition of outback

Questions about outback in a sentence

How do you use outback in a sentence?
Outback is used as a noun, adjective and adverb. For example: “In the outback, many people live and work on sheep and cattle ranches.”
What is a short sentence with outback?
“Kylie and her parents had been driving through the outback for hours.”
What does outback mean?
Outback means the most remote and desolate areas of Australia; the desert and areas too arid for growing crops.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: outback (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use outback in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/outback. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.